Abstract
This paper argues that the gravest priestly abuse in Scripture is not any single act of presumption, greed, exploitation, false teaching, or usurpation, but the capture of the office by its own self-interest — the turning of the sacred logic of substitution and atonement toward the protection of the institution itself, culminating in the high-priestly establishment’s handling of Jesus Christ. Building on the principle that has governed this suite, that proximity to the holy raises the standard and intensifies the consequence of failing it, this study contends that the high priesthood of the Gospels represents the terminal form of priestly corruption: an office that has so completely subordinated its God-given purpose to its own survival that it sacrifices the innocent to preserve itself, and that frames this self-protection in the very language of priestly mediation. The argument proceeds in five movements. First, it examines the reasoning of Caiaphas — “it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people” (John 11:50) — as the perfect inversion of priestly substitution. Second, it reads the temple traffic that Jesus cleansed, twice, as the monetization of sacred space that exposed the establishment’s true loyalties. Third, it analyzes the woes pronounced on those who “shut up the kingdom of heaven against men” (Matthew 23:13), reading the corrupt leadership as an institution that has become a barrier rather than a door. Fourth, it interprets the tearing of the temple veil at the death of Jesus Christ as the divine verdict upon the captured system. Fifth, it traces the establishment’s continued obstruction in the book of Acts as evidence that self-protection, once it captures an office, persists past every warning. The paper concludes that the self-protecting priesthood is the consummation of priestly abuse because it perverts the office’s innermost purpose — mediation for the people — into its opposite, the destruction of the people’s Mediator for the sake of the institution’s own continuance.
1. Introduction: When the Office Serves Itself
This suite has traced a typology of priestly abuse from its foundational form to its institutional culmination. Liturgical presumption corrupted the priest’s worship; greed corrupted his handling of the offerings; exploitation corrupted his use of access; false teaching corrupted his instruction; usurpation denied the appointment on which his office rested. Each abuse perverted some particular function of the priesthood. The present paper examines an abuse that is not the corruption of one function but the capture of the whole office by a single overriding interest — the interest of the institution in its own preservation. When this capture is complete, the priesthood no longer serves God or the people in any of its functions; it serves itself, and it bends every function, including its most sacred, to the end of its own survival.[^1]
The terminal expression of this capture is recorded in the Gospels, in the conduct of the high-priestly establishment toward Jesus Christ. This establishment held the highest sacred office in Israel; the high priest alone entered the most holy place on the Day of Atonement, bearing the blood that made atonement for the people. Of all men, the high priest stood nearest to the holy, and by the principle that has governed this suite, the standard to which he was held was correspondingly the highest and the consequence of his failure the most severe. The Gospels present this establishment at the moment of its supreme failure: confronted with the very Mediator whom the whole priestly system had foreshadowed, it determined to destroy Him, and it framed the determination in the language of its own office. The priesthood that existed to mediate atonement for the people resolved to sacrifice the innocent for the people’s institution, and called the resolution expedient.[^2]
This paper argues that the self-protecting priesthood is the consummation of priestly abuse because it perverts the office’s innermost purpose. The thesis can be stated as a principle of inversion: the priesthood existed to give itself for the people, mediating on their behalf before God; the captured priesthood gives the people’s Mediator to death for the sake of itself. The sacred logic of substitution — one dying that many might live — is retained in form but inverted in substance, so that the innocent is destroyed not to save the people but to save the institution. This is the deepest corruption the priesthood can suffer, for it turns the office against the very purpose for which it was given, and it does so while clothing the betrayal in the office’s own holiest language. The paper proceeds through the reasoning of Caiaphas, the cleansed temple, the woes, the torn veil, and the continued obstruction in Acts, before drawing together the lesson that an office captured by self-protection has become the enemy of the purpose it was ordained to serve.
2. The Reasoning of Caiaphas: Substitution Inverted
The defining utterance of the self-protecting priesthood is the reasoning of Caiaphas, recorded in John 11:47–53, and it repays the closest attention because it contains, in a single sentence, the perfect inversion of priestly substitution. The occasion was the council convened by the chief priests and Pharisees after the raising of Lazarus, when the multiplying signs of Jesus Christ had made the establishment fear for its position. Their stated anxiety is revealing: “If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and our nation” (John 11:48). The fear is institutional. The leaders do not deliberate whether the signs are true or whether Jesus is who He claims to be; they deliberate the threat to “our place and our nation” — to the temple establishment and the standing it secured. The question before the council is not a question of truth but a question of survival.[^3]
Into this deliberation Caiaphas, the high priest that year, speaks the decisive word: “Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (John 11:49–50). The reasoning is a calculation of expediency. One man’s death is weighed against the institution’s survival, and the calculation favors the death. The high priest proposes to sacrifice a single man to preserve the establishment, and he frames the proposal in the language of substitution — one dying for the people, that the whole not perish. This is the language of the priesthood’s own deepest function. Atonement is substitution: the sacrifice dies that the people may live; the innocent victim bears what the guilty deserved. Caiaphas speaks this language, but he speaks it inverted. In true atonement, the innocent gives himself to save the people from their sin; in Caiaphas’s calculation, the innocent is taken and destroyed to save the institution from a political threat. The substitution is real in form — one for many — but its substance is reversed. The victim is not offered to God for the people’s salvation; he is eliminated by the institution for the institution’s preservation.[^4]
The Gospel writer adds an extraordinary interpretation that deepens the irony beyond Caiaphas’s intent: “And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; and not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad” (John 11:51–52). The high priest, in the very act of plotting the death of the innocent for the institution’s sake, unwittingly spoke the truth of the atonement his office foreshadowed. Jesus would indeed die for the nation, and for the scattered children of God — but as the true substitute, the willing sacrifice, the Mediator giving Himself to save the people from their sin, not as the political victim eliminated to save the establishment from Rome. The same words bore two meanings: Caiaphas’s meaning, the cynical calculation of self-protection, and the divine meaning, the true substitution the captured priesthood could no longer perceive even as it pronounced it. The high priest who should have recognized the true sacrifice was so captured by self-interest that he could speak the words of atonement while plotting their perversion, prophesying the truth in the act of betraying it.[^5]
This is the heart of the matter and the reason the self-protecting priesthood is the gravest of abuses. The high priest did not abandon the language of his office; he retained it and inverted it. He did not cease to speak of one dying for the people; he turned that sacred logic against the very Person it pointed to. The captured priesthood does not announce its corruption by abandoning its forms; it preserves the forms and empties them of their substance, and it is most dangerous precisely because it speaks the language of mediation while practicing the destruction of the Mediator. Caiaphas’s word “expedient” is the signature of the captured office: the holy calculus of substitution has become a calculation of institutional advantage, and the death that should have been the people’s salvation has become the establishment’s self-defense.[^6]
3. The Cleansed Temple: Sacred Space Monetized
If the reasoning of Caiaphas reveals the captured priesthood’s inversion of its sacred logic, the state of the temple that Jesus Christ cleansed reveals the establishment’s true loyalties, displayed in the use to which it had put the holy place. The cleansing of the temple is recorded at the outset of His ministry in John and at its climax in the Synoptics, and the doubled placement — whether of one act differently positioned or of two distinct acts — frames the whole ministry between two confrontations with the monetized sanctuary.[^7]
The act and its accompanying word are recorded with force. Jesus entered the temple, “and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves” (Matthew 21:12). His pronouncement joined two prophetic texts: “It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves” (Matthew 21:13, citing Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11). The indictment is precise. The temple was to be the house of prayer, the place of the people’s approach to God; the establishment had made it a den of thieves, a place of commerce conducted under priestly sanction and to priestly profit. The trade in sacrificial animals and the exchange of currency for the temple tax were not in themselves illegitimate — worshippers needed acceptable animals and the proper coinage — but the conduct of this trade within the sacred precincts, and the profit the establishment drew from it, had turned the place of approach into a marketplace, and the guardians of the holy into its merchants.[^8]
The connection to the earlier paper on greed is direct, but the cleansing reveals something beyond greed. The monetization of the temple was the visible expression of the establishment’s fundamental disposition: it valued the holy place for what it yielded. The priesthood that profited from the temple traffic had come to regard the sanctuary as an asset, a source of revenue and standing, and this disposition is precisely the institutional self-interest that would, in Caiaphas’s council, weigh a man’s life against the establishment’s survival. The same loyalty that made the temple a den of thieves made the high priest reckon the death of Jesus expedient. In both, the institution served itself: in the temple traffic by drawing profit from the holy place, in the council by eliminating a threat to its position. The cleansing exposed the disposition that the council would carry to its terrible conclusion.[^9]
It is significant that the cleansing provoked the establishment’s hostility in a way that crystallized their resolve against Him. The chief priests and scribes, the Gospel records, “sought how they might destroy him: for they feared him, because all the people was astonished at his doctrine” (Mark 11:18). The cleansing struck at the establishment’s interest directly — at the commerce of the temple and at the standing the temple secured — and the establishment responded not with repentance but with a deepened determination to destroy the one who had exposed them. This response is itself diagnostic of the captured office. A priesthood concerned for the holiness of the house would have received the cleansing as a rebuke to be heeded; a priesthood captured by self-interest received it as a threat to be eliminated. The cleansing of the temple and the plot against Jesus Christ are two moments of a single dynamic: the holy place defended by the One whose house it was, and the establishment that had captured the holy place moving to destroy Him for the defense.[^10]
The deepest irony of the cleansing lies in the authority by which it was performed. The temple was the LORD’s house; the One who cleansed it acted with the authority of the house’s Owner, exercising precisely the guardianship of the holy that the priesthood had abandoned. The establishment that should have kept the house of prayer pure had defiled it with commerce; the true Guardian came and cleansed what its appointed guardians had corrupted. The cleansing was thus a judgment in enacted form — the rightful authority over the sanctuary displacing, for a moment, the corrupt stewardship that had captured it, and demonstrating by the act what the establishment had become. The merchants in the temple were the visible sign of a priesthood that had made the holy place serve itself, and their expulsion was the visible sign of the judgment that the captured office had earned.[^11]
4. The Woes: An Institution Become a Barrier
The fullest verbal indictment of the corrupt leadership is the series of woes pronounced in Matthew 23, and while these are addressed to the scribes and Pharisees rather than to the high-priestly establishment specifically, they articulate the principle that defines the captured office in its relation to the people: the leadership that should have been a door to the kingdom had become a barrier against it. The woes thus generalize the indictment from the particular establishment that plotted against Jesus Christ to the whole corrupt leadership of which it was the head, and they name the essential offense of an office that serves itself rather than the people it was set over.
The first woe states the principle: “But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in” (Matthew 23:13). The image is exact. The leadership held the position of those who controlled access to the kingdom — who, by their teaching and their authority, could open the way to God or close it. They had closed it. They themselves did not enter, and they prevented those who would. The office of access had become an office of obstruction. The men who should have opened the door stood in it, barring the way both for themselves and for the people they were set to lead. This is the captured office in its relation to the people: an institution that, having ceased to serve their approach to God, now actively impedes it, because the people’s free approach to God threatens the leadership’s own indispensability.[^12]
The woes proceed to expose the disposition behind the obstruction, and it is consistently the same self-serving disposition that the paper has traced. The leaders love the chief seats and the greetings in the markets and the titles of honor (Matthew 23:5–7); they devour the resources of the vulnerable while making long prayers (Matthew 23:14); they strain at gnats and swallow camels, meticulous in trivial observance and negligent of “the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith” (Matthew 23:23–24); they cleanse the outside while within they are full of extortion and excess (Matthew 23:25). The portrait is of a leadership wholly given to the preservation and display of its own standing, scrupulous in the externals that maintained its position and empty of the justice and mercy that its office existed to serve. The obstruction of the kingdom is the natural fruit of this disposition: an office concerned for its own honor and survival will inevitably obstruct whatever threatens them, including the free approach of the people to the God who could make the office unnecessary.[^13]
The culmination of the woes reaches the establishment’s deepest guilt — the killing of those whom God sent. Jesus Christ charges the leadership as the heirs of those who killed the prophets, and declares that upon them will come the accumulated guilt of the righteous blood shed from Abel onward (Matthew 23:29–36). The lament that follows is among the most sorrowful in Scripture: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” (Matthew 23:37). The captured leadership’s defining act, across the generations, was the destruction of the messengers God sent — for the messengers threatened the leadership’s standing, exposed its corruption, and called the people to the God who would render the corrupt office obsolete. The killing of the prophets and the plot against Jesus Christ are the same act in different generations: the self-protecting institution eliminating those whose mission endangered it. The woes thus connect the immediate conspiracy of Caiaphas to the long pattern of an office that, whenever God’s messengers threatened its position, chose its own survival over the message and destroyed the messenger.[^14]
5. The Torn Veil: The Verdict on the System
The divine verdict upon the captured priesthood is rendered not in words but in an act, at the moment of the death of Jesus Christ: “And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent” (Matthew 27:51). The tearing of the veil is the climactic judgment-sign of the entire suite, and its meaning must be read against the whole priestly system the suite has traced.
The veil was the curtain that separated the holy place from the most holy place, the barrier that guarded the immediate presence of God. Behind it the high priest alone entered, and only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, bearing the blood of the sacrifice. The veil was thus the very emblem of the priestly system’s mediating function: it marked the boundary of God’s presence and the necessity of the priestly mediation by which that presence was approached. The high priest’s annual passage through the veil with the atoning blood was the system’s central act, the point at which the whole apparatus of priesthood, sacrifice, and sanctuary converged upon the approach to God.[^15]
The tearing of this veil, at the moment of the death of Jesus Christ, “from the top to the bottom,” carries a meaning that the suite’s argument makes precise. The tear is from the top — from God’s side, not man’s — marking it as a divine act rather than a human one. And it renders the veil’s function obsolete: the barrier that guarded God’s presence and required the priestly mediation is torn open, the way into the most holy place laid bare. The verdict is twofold. On the one hand, it declares that the true atonement has been accomplished — that the death of Jesus Christ has opened the way into God’s presence that the whole sacrificial system had foreshadowed but could never finally achieve, so that the access the priesthood mediated is now opened to all through Him. On the other hand, and this is the verdict most pertinent to the captured priesthood, it declares the obsolescence of the system the establishment had captured. The veil that was the emblem of priestly mediation is torn; the system that had been seized for self-protection, that had made the temple a den of thieves and pronounced the death of the Mediator expedient, is set aside by the very act it had perpetrated. The priesthood that destroyed the Mediator to preserve itself is, by that destruction, rendered obsolete, for the Mediator’s death accomplished the atonement that made the captured system unnecessary.[^16]
The judgment-form here is structural rather than personal. Where earlier abuses drew immediate fire, reversal of blessing, contempt before the people, or bodily exposure, the captured priesthood draws the structural judgment of having the office itself set aside. The system is not merely rebuked; it is superseded. The torn veil declares that the function the captured priesthood had perverted is now fulfilled and transferred — that the access to God it had monetized, obstructed, and finally defended by murder is now opened freely through the One it killed. The institution that served itself is judged by being made superfluous: the very thing it sought to preserve, its indispensable mediating position, is abolished by the atonement its self-protection had unwittingly accomplished. The establishment killed the Mediator to keep its place; the Mediator’s death tore the veil and ended the place’s necessity. This is the most complete judgment the suite has encountered, for it does not merely punish the corrupt officeholders but supersedes the corrupted office, fulfilling and transferring its function to the One whom the office had destroyed.[^17]
6. The Continued Obstruction: Self-Protection Past Every Warning
The book of Acts records that the captured priesthood, even after the resurrection and the torn veil, persisted in its self-protecting obstruction, and this persistence is the final evidence the paper adduces for the nature of the abuse: self-protection, once it has captured an office, does not yield to evidence or warning but defends itself past every demonstration of its error. The same establishment that had plotted the death of Jesus Christ continued, in the apostolic period, to obstruct the proclamation of His resurrection, and for the same reason — the threat the proclamation posed to its position.
The pattern is established at the first apostolic confrontation. When Peter and John healed the lame man and preached the resurrection, “the priests, and the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees, came upon them, being grieved that they taught the people, and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead” (Acts 4:1–2). The leaders’ grief was not at falsehood but at the teaching of the people — at the apostles’ assumption of the teaching role and the content of their message, which vindicated the One the establishment had killed. The council’s deliberation echoes the council of Caiaphas: “What shall we do to these men?… that it spread no further among the people, let us straitly threaten them” (Acts 4:16–17). The concern is containment, the prevention of the message’s spread, the protection of the establishment’s position against a movement that threatened it. The same institutional self-interest that pronounced the death of Jesus expedient now sought to suppress the proclamation of His resurrection.[^18]
The persistence deepens despite mounting evidence. When the apostles, having been imprisoned, were found teaching again in the temple, the high priest’s complaint laid bare the establishment’s true concern: “Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name? and, behold, ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man’s blood upon us” (Acts 5:28). The phrase “bring this man’s blood upon us” is the captured priesthood condemning itself; the establishment feared the very guilt it had incurred, and sought to suppress the proclamation that exposed it. Even Gamaliel’s counsel of caution — that if the movement were of God they could not overthrow it, and might be found fighting against God (Acts 5:38–39) — did not finally turn the establishment from its course. The pattern reached its climax in the stoning of Stephen, whose indictment of the leadership as the heirs of those who killed the prophets and the betrayers and murderers of the Righteous One (Acts 7:51–53) provoked the same lethal response the prophets and Jesus Christ had received. The captured priesthood answered the charge of killing God’s messengers by killing another.[^19]
This persistence is theologically instructive, and it completes the portrait of the abuse. An office captured by self-protection does not merely commit a single grave act and then relent; it defends itself continuously, against every warning, every demonstration, every exposure of its error. The resurrection itself, the torn veil, the apostolic signs, the counsel of caution from within its own ranks — none of these turned the establishment from its course, because the disposition that had captured the office was self-protection, and self-protection by its nature resists whatever threatens it, including the truth. The captured office cannot repent without ceasing to be what it has become, for repentance would require it to value something above its own survival, and it is precisely the subordination of all else to its survival that constitutes its capture. The continued obstruction in Acts shows the abuse in its settled and final form: an institution so given to its own preservation that it will resist God Himself rather than surrender the position it has made its god.[^20]
7. Conclusion: The Consummation of Priestly Abuse
This paper has argued that the capture of the priestly office by self-protection is the consummation of priestly abuse, because it perverts the office’s innermost purpose — mediation for the people — into its opposite, the destruction of the people’s Mediator for the sake of the institution’s continuance. The reasoning of Caiaphas displays the inversion at its core: the high priest retained the sacred language of substitution, “one man should die for the people,” and turned it against the very Person it foreshadowed, pronouncing the death of the innocent expedient for the establishment’s survival, and prophesying the true atonement in the act of betraying it (John 11:49–52). The cleansed temple displayed the establishment’s true loyalties, the holy place made a den of thieves by a priesthood that valued the sanctuary for what it yielded, and that moved to destroy the One who exposed the corruption (Matthew 21:12–13; Mark 11:18). The woes named the captured office’s essential offense, the leadership become a barrier rather than a door, obstructing the people’s approach to God and killing the messengers whose mission threatened its standing (Matthew 23:13, 37). The torn veil rendered the divine verdict, superseding the captured system by the very atonement its self-protection had unwittingly accomplished, opening freely through the slain Mediator the access the establishment had monetized and defended by murder (Matthew 27:51). And the continued obstruction in Acts showed the abuse in its final form, an institution defending itself past every warning, unable to repent without ceasing to be what it had become.
The self-protecting priesthood is the gravest of the abuses this suite has traced because it is the corruption of the office at the deepest possible point. The earlier abuses perverted particular functions — worship, the offerings, access, teaching, appointment — but each left the office’s fundamental orientation toward God and the people formally intact, however corrupted in practice. The captured office inverts that orientation itself. The priesthood existed to give for the people, to mediate on their behalf, to bear the atoning blood into God’s presence for their salvation; the captured priesthood gives the people’s Mediator to death for the sake of itself, and in doing so turns the office against the purpose for which it was created. There is no deeper corruption available to a sacred office than to make its own survival the end to which it sacrifices the very salvation it was ordained to serve. And there is a terrible justice in the judgment that answers it. The establishment killed the Mediator to preserve its indispensable place; the Mediator’s death tore the veil and abolished the place’s necessity, so that the institution’s self-protection accomplished its own supersession. The office that would not give itself for the people, but gave the people’s Savior to death for itself, was set aside by the very atonement it had perpetrated, and the access it had captured was opened freely to all through the One it had destroyed. Judgment began at the sanctuary, as it had from the first; and at the last, the sanctuary’s veil was torn from the top, and the captured house was left desolate, that the people might come near to God by a new and living way that the corrupt guardians of the old could neither monetize nor obstruct nor destroy.
Notes
[^1]: On the distinction between the corruption of particular priestly functions and the capture of the whole office by institutional self-interest, developed here as the culmination of the suite’s typology, see the treatment of the temple establishment in Wright (1996, pp. 405–428) and the analysis of priestly politics in the late Second Temple period in Sanders (1992, pp. 170–189).
[^2]: On the high priesthood’s nearness to the holy and the corresponding height of its accountability, see the first paper of this suite and compare the discussion of the high-priestly office in Lane (1991, pp. 113–120). On the establishment’s confrontation with the Mediator the system foreshadowed, see Carson (1991, pp. 419–423).
[^3]: On the council of John 11:47–48 and the institutional fear for “our place and our nation,” see Carson (1991, pp. 419–421), Köstenberger (2004, pp. 348–351), and Keener (2003, pp. 851–856).
[^4]: On Caiaphas’s reasoning (John 11:49–50) as a calculation of expediency framed in the language of substitution, and its inversion of true atonement, see Carson (1991, pp. 421–423), Köstenberger (2004, pp. 350–353), and Beasley-Murray (1999, pp. 197–200).
[^5]: On the Gospel writer’s interpretation of Caiaphas’s unwitting prophecy (John 11:51–52), see Carson (1991, pp. 422–424), Keener (2003, pp. 854–858), and Brown (1966, pp. 442–447).
[^6]: On the captured office’s retention of sacred forms emptied of substance, developed here from the doubled meaning of Caiaphas’s word, compare the analysis of institutional hypocrisy in Wright (1996, pp. 417–428).
[^7]: On the placement of the temple cleansing in John (2:13–22) and the Synoptics (Matthew 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–18; Luke 19:45–46), and the question of one act or two, see Carson (1991, pp. 176–182), Blomberg (1992, pp. 314–317), and the discussion in Köstenberger (2004, pp. 105–111).
[^8]: On the cleansing act and the joined citation of Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11 (Matthew 21:12–13), see France (2007, pp. 783–790), Blomberg (1992, pp. 314–318), and the treatment of the temple commerce in Evans (2001, pp. 173–182).
[^9]: On the monetization of the temple as the visible expression of the establishment’s disposition, and its connection to the institutional self-interest of the council, see Wright (1996, pp. 413–428) and Evans (2001, pp. 178–185); compare the third paper of this suite on priestly greed.
[^10]: On the establishment’s hostile response to the cleansing (Mark 11:18) as diagnostic of the captured office, see France (2002, pp. 444–449) and Edwards (2002, pp. 341–346).
[^11]: On the cleansing as an enacted judgment by the rightful authority over the sanctuary, see France (2007, pp. 785–792), Wright (1996, pp. 413–428), and the discussion of the temple action as prophetic sign in Evans (2001, pp. 173–182).
[^12]: On the first woe (Matthew 23:13) and the image of the leadership as a barrier shutting up the kingdom, see France (2007, pp. 862–868), Blomberg (1992, pp. 343–346), and Carson (1984, pp. 477–482).
[^13]: On the self-serving disposition exposed across the woes (Matthew 23:5–7, 14, 23–25), see France (2007, pp. 854–872) and Carson (1984, pp. 471–485).
[^14]: On the culmination of the woes in the killing of the prophets and the lament over Jerusalem (Matthew 23:29–37), see France (2007, pp. 875–885), Blomberg (1992, pp. 347–350), and the treatment of the prophet-killing motif in Carson (1984, pp. 484–490).
[^15]: On the veil and its function as the emblem of priestly mediation and the boundary of God’s presence, see Lane (1991, pp. 240–245) on the corresponding theology in Hebrews, and the discussion of the temple veil in France (2007, pp. 1079–1082).
[^16]: On the tearing of the veil “from the top to the bottom” (Matthew 27:51) as a divine act bearing the twofold meaning of accomplished atonement and superseded system, see France (2007, pp. 1079–1083), Blomberg (1992, pp. 421–423), Carson (1984, pp. 580–582), and the theological treatment in Lane (1991, pp. 240–247).
[^17]: On the structural judgment of the captured office by supersession, developed here in connection with the suite’s typology of judgment-forms, see the eighth paper of this suite and compare the theology of the obsolescence of the old system in Lane (1991, pp. 240–250).
[^18]: On the first apostolic confrontation (Acts 4:1–2, 16–17) and the establishment’s concern for containment, see Bock (2007, pp. 184–195), Peterson (2009, pp. 185–195), and Marshall (1980, pp. 97–105).
[^19]: On the deepening persistence (Acts 5:28, 38–39) and the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:51–53), see Bock (2007, pp. 240–250, 308–315), Peterson (2009, pp. 215–225, 260–268), and Marshall (1980, pp. 115–122, 144–150).
[^20]: On the theological significance of the captured office’s inability to repent without ceasing to be what it has become, developed here from the pattern of continued obstruction, compare the analysis of institutional self-protection in Wright (1996, pp. 417–428).
References
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